1. Technical Field
The present teaching relates generally to information processing. Specifically, the present teaching relates to method and system for providing information processing service.
2. Discussion of Related Art
In modern society, information processing is ubiquitous. Information processing systems are generally referred to as applications. For example, medical diagnostic imaging applications may be used to perform diagnostic analysis of, e.g., abnormalities and such analysis may be performed based on different types of information such as data obtained by examining different aspects of patients such as bodies, organs, tissues, or genotype information. Some clinical application tasks are object-oriented or dedicated with often different levels of complexities. This is so even when used for a specific target to be analyzed.
Conventional information processing systems are usually required either to be installed locally on a computer or to be downloaded from a remote site and then installed on a computer. Such installation, locally or remotely, requires an entire system or application to reside on the computer on which the application runs. Once the entire system resides on a computer, a user who desires to utilize part of the application or system to accomplish a specific task, e.g., diagnostic analysis, may invoke corresponding function(s) of the locally installed application to complete the task(s). In addition, information to be analyzed by the information processing system is usually provided to the computer where the entire information processing application resides.
For example, in medical information processing, to utilize a medical information processing application to analyze medical data such as images, a user may utilize different functionalities of the medical information processing application. To do so, the user may have two alternatives. First, the user may install the entire application or system in a local computer. In today's commercial world, this requires the user to purchase a license for the entire application software even though there may be many functions in the same application software that the user may never need. In addition to the cost of paying for unwanted functionality, there are situations in which expensive hardware configurations/upgrades may also be required in order to support an execution environment that a complete information processing system needs. This drives the cost even higher and, hence, makes such information processing systems less affordable to users. Furthermore, when a user purchases an information processing system, it is usually the user's responsibility to maintain the system, which can be very costly and sometimes difficult. On top of that, when a new version of an information processing system is released, more expense is incurred if an upgrade is needed. A substantial portion of the cost may be unnecessary particularly when a user uses only a portion of all functions associated with an information processing application.
One alternative to individual purchase of an information processing application is to share an information processing application residing, e.g., on a server. Whenever a user needs to invoke a particular function of the application, the user also needs to send the data to be analyzed to the server. For example, in medical imaging, the image or data associated therewith are sent to the server for processing and analysis. When the volume of data to be analyzed is high, e.g., images, this makes the entire process very time-consuming. In addition, this may increase the traffic on the network, causing congestion. Furthermore, in some applications especially medical imaging or clinical applications, this is simply not a practical solution.